Koha Tutorial Videos

Monday Minutes: Grouping Items with Holds

by Kelly McElligott on Apr 24, 2023

In this week's Monday Minutes, Kelly and Jessie talk about a new feature coming in 22.11 that will allow libraries to group items within a record and also allow patrons to place holds on this 'group'.

System Preferences

There are two system preferences that can be used with this feature:

EnableItemGroups will allow the library to create groups of items within the same record.

EnableItemGroupHolds will allow holds to be placed on a group of items.

Staff Permissions

There is one permission you will need to set for staff

Create, update and delete item groups, add or remove items from an item group (manage_item_groups)

This permissions is found under Edit catalog (Modify bibliographic/holdings data) (editcatalogue)

Creating Groups and Adding Items

In our first example during the tutorial video, we showed the TV Series, Yellowstone. If a library has either multiple copies of the same discs or a multibranch library system, where DVDs are shared. In these cases, a library can groups all Disc 1s together into a group called "Disc 1", and so on for Disc 2, Disc 3, etc.

Enabling the system preference EnableItemGroups will create a new tab "Item Groups" in the holdings section of the item.

Clicking on the new tab, Item Groups will allow libraries to create a new item group. Koha will allow the library to name the group and indicate the order of the group to display.

Once a group has been created, then click the items in the holdings tab to indicate which items will be associated with that group.

Editing

A group can be removed at any time as well as items can be removed from a group.

To remove a group, under the Item Group Tab, all groups will be listed. From this list, a group can be edited and deleted.

To remove items from a group, go through the same process as adding items to a group, but instead choose, the Remove Items From Group option.

Holds on Item Groups

On both the staff interface and the OPAC, when a hold is placed on a record that has item groups, there will be a new option to allow for the hold to be placed on a group. Here is an image from the staff interface on what the Item Group hold would look like: